Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility
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Hidalgo_Unique in the crowd.pdf
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Author(s)
de Montjoye, Yves-Alexandre
Verleysen, Michel
Blondel, Vincent D.
Hidalgo Ramaciotti, Cesar A.
Date Issued
March 2013
Journal
Scientific Reports
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
Citation
De Montjoye, Yves-Alexandre, Cesar A. Hidalgo, Michel Verleysen, and Vincent D. Blondel. “Unique in the Crowd: The Privacy Bounds of Human Mobility.” Sci. Rep. 3 (March 25, 2013).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We study fifteen months of human mobility data for one and a half million individuals and find that human mobility traces are highly unique. In fact, in a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly, and with a spatial resolution equal to that given by the carrier's antennas, four spatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals. We coarsen the data spatially and temporally to find a formula for the uniqueness of human mobility traces given their resolution and the available outside information. This formula shows that the uniqueness of mobility traces decays approximately as the [1 over 10] power of their resolution. Hence, even coarse datasets provide little anonymity. These findings represent fundamental constraints to an individual's privacy and have important implications for the design of frameworks and institutions dedicated to protect the privacy of individuals.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/srep01376
